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Thursday, April 10, 2014

I-800A to USCIS! (adoption update)

I know that for those of you who don't speak "adoption" (yes... at times it's like a whole other language!) that title might not mean much. So let me explain...

We just sent our adoption pre-approval papers (I-800A) to US immigration (USCIS) which is a big step in our adoption!

Even though we turned in our finished homestudy paperwork on December 16th, we didn't get our completed homestudy in our hands until March 10th** (from our contract agency). So that's why you haven't heard an update in a while. Once we had that though, the ball was rolling! On March 26th our placing agency was able to send off our I800-A application to the USCIS office (U. S. Citizenship Immigration Service). We should get an appointment from them soon to have another round of fingerprints done, and then they'll review everything and (hopefully) approve us to adopt a child! This is the first half of the approvals we'll need from USCIS (they will also have to approve a specific child to be adopted by us and brought into the US - but that won't happen until after we're matched.)

So you're probably wondering, what's next?

Right now we're waiting on our 2nd fingerprint appointment, and waiting on USCIS approval of our I-800A. This should take around 6-8 weeks.

In the meantime, we are also working on finishing our dossier, which is a fancy way of saying, "a huge stack of important paperwork." This includes things like our homestudy, financial info, references, marriage license, medical reports, etc. We almost have all our paperwork, so now we have to LEGALIZE it. This means that almost everything in our dossier (around 50 pages of documents) must be (1) notarized (2) notarized/legalized again by the County Clerk from whatever county that notary is located in (3) notarized/legalized again by the State Dept from whatever state the notary is from (we'll have to do this for documents in Alabama, Arkansas, and Georgia). Then we'll send all our paperwork to our placing agency, and they will handle making sure our dossier is (4) notarized/legalized by the US Dept of State and (5) notarized/legalized a final time by the Thai Consulate. Whew!

We're not sure how long this will all take, but we're hoping that all of the above will be done by the end of May (>>fingers crossed<<). At that point our legalized, official dossier + our USCIS I800-A approval will be sent to Thailand and we will finally, officially be waiting to be matched with a child!

From there, the timeline is honestly unknown, but we have been given some estimates. Our agency said that the average time to receive a referral once our paperwork is in Thailand is 9 months (but of course, it could be a shorter or longer amount of time.) Once we have a referral and have officially been matched with our child, we should be able to travel to get her within 6 months!

That means we could be going to get Kate from Thailand sometime around August 2015, though there's really no way to know for sure right now.

Of course there will be other paperwork to file along the way, but I am really excited that our major paperwork (homestudy and dossier) are almost behind us! I can't wait to have all these forms and documents off my "to do" list, and to just be able to focus on fun things... like learning more Thai language, finishing some projects in our new home, and learning to use my new sewing machine before my baby girl gets home!

If you could pray for FOCUS as we diligently work to finish our dossier, that would be such a blessing. Please pray too for all these government workers to process our paperwork quickly, and that nothing gets lost in the mail!

** If you've been following our process, then you know that it took us a year to finish our homestudy. I don't want our timeline to scare anyone away from adopting, so I thought I should note that this is not the norm! Usually a homestudy takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months. We put ours on hold for 3 months because we were moving our home and non-profit, and renovating several rooms of our house (which is not a good time to have important papers lying around!) Unfortunately, it was then delayed an additional 6 months because the contract agency we chose for our homestudy had excessive homestudy requirements that were very time consuming (which was quite frustrating for us.) Everyone's timeline is different with every adoption, but I didn't want anyone expecting their homestudy to take as long as ours! You can learn from our mistake however. I would encourage you to really research the requirements and timeline for any agency you hire as your contract (homestudy) agency or your placing agency. We have learned that they can differ greatly, even for a Hague homestudy!

2 comments:

Just found your blog tonight and I feel so blessed and encouraged just reading about your adoption journey and Sound of Hope. We have just started the research/ prayer phase of where we should adopt from. My husband and I like you and your husband have an international focus. We live in the UK right now and we are also prayerfully starting a non-profit focused on ending human trafficking. I totally agreed with your post on the end it movement. A red "x" on a hand will not free 30 million slaves in the world. So much needs to be done in our communities, churches and governments to end this gross injustice.

Could I email you and ask you some questions on your adoption journey and about starting a non-profit?